>>389859>FranceI don't think the culture in the UK in the 18th Century was as similar to the culture of France at that time than you think.
In the Americas, in the late 18th Century, Englishmen, with the enthusiastic assistance of almost-English Scots and Irish Protestants, created and carried out a successful separatist movement (no. not a revolution. there is a significant difference.) in order to gain independence and sovereignty, to establish a new social order, a government of laws, not a government of men. Right around the same time, in France, Frenchmen waged a war, outwardly similar, with the oft-stated goal of creating a government of laws, not a government of men.
You may have noticed that these two undertakings did not turn out the same. We got the Constitution and about a century and a half of mostly benevolent, mostly libertarian-ish, mostly open and transparent government. The French got a fifteen-year-long bloodbath, which lasted right up until Napoleon appeared on the scene, on horseback, and invented fascism.
If their culture and ours are that similar, I would have thought that a popular uprising in the name of reclaiming sovereignty and rights from a decayed, corrupt aristocracy would have turned out similarly. I have heard it blamed on personalities. We got Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin. They got Robespierre and Saint-Just. But how is it that the War for Independence in the North American colonies got so many brilliant, heroic, courageous, selfless men, the finest minds of their generation, to act as its leaders, but the French got a bunch of cackling homicidal maniacs? And the French aristocrats they guillotined were little better; more than one count and duke in southern France was found to have kept scrupulous records of the bribes he'd accepted from the Barbary Pirates to allow them to raid coastal towns for slaves, and indeed the Kings of France had formal treaties of alliance with the Sultan of Byzantium, to whom the Barbary Pirates owed at least nominal allegiance, for two hundred and fifty years. To say "well, that's just the way the dice rolled" is to beg the question.
I think the French, and by that I mean the indigenous wypipo of what is now France, a people of common birth, language, and culture, are very, very, VERY different from us in many of their attitudes and the way they view the world. I don't think it comes down to something as simpleminded as religion, either. I don't think Catholicism made them uniquely corrupt and wicked. And to say "it's genetic" is glib. I can pose the questions but I have no final answers.